Crazy New Ideas • Hacker News Board

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#541

Post by defaultname » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:40 PM UTC

geebee wrote: post #388

Lots of comments already, but I'll chime on in. I realized this very late in life, but I have a test for when it's time to pay attention to a new technology. It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome. The web: couldn't you ju…

Dropbox became a thing among technical users before it bridged to mainstream users. We all knew other, kludgy ways of doing the same thing, but it made it a little easier so we adopted it. Soon enough we were telling mainstream users that it's a good solution. Wikis and blogs began among technical people and grew out from there. Reddit was basically /r/programming in its early days.

I didn't pay attention to early Twitter, but I'd wager it probably leaned pretty heavily to the software dev demographic.

There is a bit of a disconnect that a lot of people are casting technical users as if it's the group that you shouldn't listen to. As if you can find single cases and say "See!" and that proves the point [1]. Yet an overwhelming percentage of products in the technology space first saw success among the most technical of all. If you don't get that group, it often is doomed to failure.

[1] - just as an aside, there is a tendency of many to point out some "top" comment on some site like HN as if it therefore is the majority opinion. It doesn't work that way. We all don't have mandatory votes on every comment, and even a tiny amount of clustering can send a minority opinion to the top.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#542

Post by AlexCoventry » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:40 PM UTC

gustavo-fring wrote: post #431

graeme wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! I wanted to write a positive comment but couldn’t put my finger on it. This is exactly what has me interested in Mighty: making things ever so slightly easier. I already have a fast computer, but I’d still like to try, as there is room for surprise. And the service suggests it is aimed at reducing all manner of friction in using a browser: tab management, etc This may or may not work but there seems to be…

Yeah but if you found out a quicker and more efficient way to stop people from reading HN, every business would want it because their workers would stop bloviating 4 hours a day for those who know what it is, and the rest of the world would continue on ignorant of it as it always has. But it's not worth anything. Sometimes you just can't clean up garbage. Graham has too many dishonest people in YC. They're like gollu…

How do you determine how many upvotes a post has received?

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#543

Post by pjmorris » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:40 PM UTC

geebee wrote: post #388

Lots of comments already, but I'll chime on in. I realized this very late in life, but I have a test for when it's time to pay attention to a new technology. It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome. The web: couldn't you ju…

This seems related to Clarke's First Law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Second Law: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#544

Post by ZephyrBlu » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:41 PM UTC

gofreddygo wrote: post #465

dunkelheit wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People always bring Dropbox to these discussions as an example of a startup that was dismissed by HN but turned out to be huge, but turns out there are examples of the opposite thing happening too! Does anyone remember Color Labs? Go read this thread and marvel at the similarities: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2364463 . A stellar team backed by top VCs who invested (extraordinary at the time) $41M sets out to…

I see this as a pessimism/optimism spectrum. We are on the extreme left if we can reliably predict successes and on the extreme right if we can reliably predict failures. As we pick a few datapoints (Dropbox, Coinbase, Airbnb) and we average it out, we are pushed towards the left. More data we pick (colorlabs for example, and I'm sure many others) we are pushed more towards the right. Most popular article dealing wit…

> My instinct says we are squarely around the center where we can't predict shit

Completely agree. There are a lot of people in this post trying to rationalize their own biased opinion on what predicts success or failure though.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#545

Post by simonh » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:43 PM UTC

dvt wrote: post #440

geebee wrote: post #388

Lots of comments already, but I'll chime on in. I realized this very late in life, but I have a test for when it's time to pay attention to a new technology. It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome. The web: couldn't you ju…

> It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome. This is basically putting the cart before the horse and pretty much the definition of hindsight bias. We all know the BrandonM/Dropbox quip, but that's just a fun anecdote, not som…

It’s not hindsight bias if you think it’s face smackingly obvious at the time.

I agree there’s still a conundrum here, why is something obviously one way to some very smart people like BrandonM while the exact opposite seems just as obvious to other people. I suspect it’s more about what people value than what they know technically.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#546

Post by nearbuy » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:44 PM UTC

> Whatever the church thought of the heliocentric model, astronomers must have been convinced as soon as Copernicus proposed it. Far, in fact, from it.

I don't think this tells the whole story. The church didn't immediately view the heliocentric model as a crazy new idea.

> In 1533, Johann Albrecht Widmannstetter delivered a series of lectures in Rome outlining Copernicus's theory. Pope Clement VII and several Catholic cardinals heard the lectures and were interested in the theory. On 1 November 1536, Cardinal Nikolaus von Schönberg, Archbishop of Capua, wrote to Copernicus from Rome:

> "... Therefore with the utmost earnestness I entreat you, most learned sir, unless I inconvenience you, to communicate this discovery of yours to scholars, and at the earliest possible moment to send me your writings on the sphere of the universe together with the tables and whatever else you have that is relevant to this subject ..."

(From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Copernicus#Heliocentr...)

The church's stance against the heliocentric model developed later, and probably for religious and political reasons.

Secondly, rational astronomers shouldn't have been convinced of the model as soon as Copernicus proposed it. It wasn't yet proven. It's like string theory today. It may have been an elegant theory, but a good scientist shouldn't consider a theory proven until it's actually proven.

Relating this back more generally to the essay, I think there's a bias in how we retell stories from history that makes it seem like great new ideas were initially mostly considered crazy. It makes a better story when one person overcomes the odds and invents something great despite everyone telling them they're crazy. But reality, most new ideas had a mix of detractors and supporters. We just remember the detractors better and amuse ourselves thinking about how wrong they were.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#547

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:47 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #540

bmmayer1 wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the BrandonM/Dropbox quip?

Other users have provided the link, but my heart sinks a little every time I see this brought up, especially when the commenter is singled out by name. People forget that this is a real person. He also happens to be a great HN contributor, and has been for many years. I realize it's internet fun to point neon arrows at people seeming outrageously wrong in the past, but the truth is that people aren't reading that com…

[deleted]

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#548

Post by tutfbhuf » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:52 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #533

tutfbhuf wrote: post #198

Is it possible to add a HN filter (hide) all paulgraham.com posts? I'm not interested in his posts and they pop up very often on HN.

People ask for the same thing for politics, and for various subjects. So how many different "hide" filters should we create? Then there's the classification problem. Is post X really about politics? It's not binary. The only solution that would even approximately work would be to add a block list of domains to peoples' profiles. That way, if you don't want to see anything from paulgraham.com, and I don't want to see…

It could be very easy. Just hide all posts from that specific website, a very easy filter, not classification problem.

> It's really easy to just move your eyes to the next line.

Well if it's that easy, then why is there an hide button on HN in the first place?

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#549

Post by geebee » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:52 PM UTC

allenu wrote: post #539

geebee wrote: post #388

Lots of comments already, but I'll chime on in. I realized this very late in life, but I have a test for when it's time to pay attention to a new technology. It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome. The web: couldn't you ju…

I really don't remember tech people poo-pooing some of the examples you gave as "couldn't you..." I think you're looking at these examples with too fine a lens of implementation, especially in retrospect. the web: I was a teen when people started using local "freenets" to connect to a text-only web and I think most people who tried it were amazed that you could instantly view content somebody on the other side of the…

I agree. These are examples of things I initially dismissed, in part because I thought didn’t see how they addressed the minor factors that were holding back a sudden and widespread adoption. And yeah, I think there is a technical element to this and I do recall technical people puzzled about how popular web pages in a browser had become (seeing it as an unusually limited interface).

Not all though, for all I know this was an unusual perspective even among technically savvy people. I suppose the people who saw the possibility and could act in it were both technical but capable of seeing things outside that narrow lense.

Also remember I wrote these as examples of things I reasoned incorrectly about!

EDIT - re-reading my comment above, I see I did write "technical people" rather than "me". I'm sure I'm not at all alone in having this tendency, but I'm definitely not ready to defend the idea that this is a universal or even common tendency among technical people. Perhaps I should have written "when I find myself thinking "couldn't you just""...

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#550

Post by kabes » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:54 PM UTC

mgranados wrote: post #482

geebee wrote: post #388

Lots of comments already, but I'll chime on in. I realized this very late in life, but I have a test for when it's time to pay attention to a new technology. It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome. The web: couldn't you ju…

Good heuristic.

It would only be a good heuristic if the same thing isn't being said about actual bad, failed ideas. But I'm pretty sure you can find similar "can't you just" remarks for those.